Kara Martinez's Final Logo

I had originally had the hands upside down because I really wanted to use some of the fingers as an "M" shape so that I could start my organization's name (Multiracial at Madison) off with that. However, I felt that it somewhat messed up the message being sent by the image of the hands. I wanted the hands to convey the message that "I am here!" "I am a multiracial student at JMU," or "There are  many of us," or something along those lines. I don't feel that message was being conveyed with the hands upside down. Like Rob said, it looked like they were reaching down. This is what motivated me to turn them around. So, not being able to use the fingers as the letter "M," I went ahead and just typed out the entire name of the organization using a font that I felt went well and was still visible. I thought a good way to unify the words and hands was to use the same colors for the words as the hands. I did so by utilizing the Eye dropper tool on sumo paint, and I definitely wanted to make sure that "Madison" was the gold color - which I thought worked out nicely. I also asked several people at work what their thoughts were on my varying the colors of the letters in the word "Multiracial," and they seemed to prefer that over only using one color for the word. I also felt it went along with the message; multiracial individuals come from a multitude of backgrounds with varying phenotypes. I am pleased with the overall turnout.

Robert Turner's Final Logo

Thanks for all the great comments and likes on the first draft y'all.  I went back and played around with the coloring a bit.  I ended up doing a basic color for the John C. Wells Text and faded both the main and sub text.  I like it, but in the future I plan on adding our Star-Ball in there to substitute in for the C in John C Wells.  For that reason I didn't bother going back in and placing a period next to the C as it will be gone once I try to draw a Star Ball in there.

Again I used GIMP for this.  After this project I am confident with putting GIMP on a CV.  Really useful piece of software once you know how to use it.  I highly recommend downloading it if you don't want to buy photoshop and also would use the lynda.com tutorials to get started.

Jordan's Final Logo

I went off the feedback I got to un-busy my logo a bit by moving the ship down to take up less of the circle background and reduced the number of waves, and blended the hull of the ship into the waves (which was way more challenging to do in Illustrator than I imagined it would be!).  I added the name of the prospective company to make sure a name could be associated with my symbol.  I am overall really pleased with how it turned out despite the snares I ran into on the way!